Project Overview

As an instructional designer in this project-based course, you will develop open educational resources (OER) for adult basic education based on the following project requirements:

• The instructional materials you design and develop will support adult learners who have not completed high school, and are taking adult basic education courses as they prepare for high school equivalency exams (i.e. the GED, HiSET, or TASC tests), or other adult basic education certifications.
• The instruction you design will align with the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) that underlie high school equivalency exams and other adult basic education programs.
• You are able to select the intended grade level and topic of the instruction from the following subject areas:
  • English Language Arts and Literacy, including History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical subjects, and
  • Mathematics
• The instructional materials you design and develop will:
  • conform to the project’s Design Guide,
  • be developed within Open Author on OER Commons,
  • incorporate guidance for the instructor implementing the lesson,
  • include all necessary content presentation, learner practice, and assessment materials for 15-30 minutes of instruction on the standard and topic you have chosen.
• Instructional materials selected for use in the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons will be licensed under a Creative Commons copyright license as free open educational resources (OER). To ensure the broadest use of your work, we request that you select a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
• All instructional materials you develop must be open educational resources that (a) our instructors and learners can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute without additional login or paywall, and (b) can be linked or embedded within Open Author.

Why Open Educational Resources?

Some may ask, “Why would we do this work only to give it away for free as an open educational resource?” The answer has lot of layers, some pragmatic and some altruistic. To hear a perspective about OER use from Jennifer Jennings, an adult education instructor from Everett Community College, please view the following video (6:52 minutes):

My OER experience by Jennifer Jennings, Everett Community College from OpenWa (Links to an external site.) on Vimeo.

From a pragmatic standpoint, we believe it is important that our work is licensed under a Creative Commons license, because we are all volunteers donating our time and effort to create this course and the resulting resources. Therefore, it is important to us that we all retain full access to the works associated with the project. From an altruistic standpoint, we founded Designers for Learning with a charitable purpose. As noted previously, Adult Education is an underserved segment, and we feel we can achieve the greatest good by sharing openly the fruits of our collective efforts. In addition, wherever possible, our goal is NOT to reinvent the wheel, but to improve upon it for our adult learner audience.

Therefore, throughout this design process, keep an eye out for existing open educational resources that can be adapted for your purposes. If there is an existing quality openly licensed image, video, assessment, etc. that aligns with the context of your lesson, by all means adapt it and use it!

Project Design Guide

As noted above, a Design Guide, has been created for this instructional design project. We will review the Design Guide in detail throughout the course, but feel free to skim the contents as an overview of the design project requirements.